What is America's pro-natalism movement really about?

by Moira Donegan



Malcolm and Simone Collins, the pro-natalist couple who are reportedly consulting the Donald Trump administration on how to encourage American women to have more babies, are something of a deliberate heel: they often seem to be attempting to provoke the ire of their audience. The couple espouse the pro-natalism that is sweeping the political right with an explicit eugenicist tilt (self-styled “elites”, the Collins scan their IVF-generated embryos before their pregnancies, in an effort to select for features like high IQ). They dress in the severe black outfits of German modernists, with an emphasis on the “German” part, and wear large, unusually shaped eyeglasses; Simone has also taken to wearing large bonnets that make her look like Mother Goose, or, in their less subtle versions, like an extra on The Handmaid’s Tale.” The pair met on Reddit.

The founders of a pro-birth organization, the Collinses’ assert that there is a crisis of declining birth rates in America. (In reality, the slight dip in America’s birth rate in recent years is almost entirely due to the decline of teen pregnancies.) They aim to fix this in part by breeding as many of their own children as possible: they currently have four, blameless innocents they have cruelly burdened with names like “Industry Americus” and “Torsten Savage”. But they seem to be more adept at siring media profiles of themselves, of which there have been many. The couple insist upon their own genetic superiority, like a breeding-obsessed Boris and Natasha. They aim to advance a future of more babies and – by their own terms – better ones: what Simone calls “genetically selected humans”. They must be doing it on purpose: no one could become so off-putting by accident.

Because these people are styling themselves after the villains of a Saturday morning cartoon, they are of course now deeply influential in the Trump administration. A New York Times report finds that the couple has been solicited by White House advisers to develop proposals to “persuade” American women to have more babies. “Persuasion” may not be entirely the right word. After all, with the fall of Roe v Wade in 2022, more than half the states now have abortion bans in effect, meaning that many American women, unable to access legal care to end their pregnancies, are being not so much persuaded as forced to have children. But for the pro-natalists, this isn’t good enough. What the movement desires – and what they are hoping their partnership with the Trump administration will achieve – is not just a rise in the American birthrate but a wholesale revolution in American culture, with enforcement of rightwing social values and a profound transformation of women’s role in American life.

The actual proposals, such as they are, are not especially inventive. Pro-natalist activists who are working with the Trump administration have advised the creation of fertility awareness classes, supposedly to make women more alert to the times of the month when they are ovulating and more likely to conceive; they have proposed “baby bonuses” of up to $5,000 each time a woman gives birth. One proposal by activists would limit a large proportion of the prestigious Fulbright grants to scholars with children – a criterion that would exclude many early career female researchers, who often find, as ambitious women in most fields do, that raising young children is incompatible with doing the kind of rigorous and demanding work that can earn them a fancy award. For their part, the Collinses proposed that the federal government should award a “National Medal of Motherhood” to women who birth six or more children. The award reminds one of the “Ehrenkreuz der Deutschen Mutter,” or the Cross of Honor of the German Mother, a Nazi prize given to mothers of four or more children. That medal took the form of a blue cross with a swastika in the center.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/23/america-pro-natalism-women